Ecclestone still soft on Melbourne

The usually combative promoter of formula one,
Bernie Ecclestone
, has struck a conciliatory note ahead of next weekend’s much-scrutinised Australian Grand Prix.

Melbourne whisked the event from under the nose of Adelaide and has hosted the race since 1996. But the cost to taxpayers of staging the race hit $50 million last year and there is renewed speculation over its value in a crowded major events calendar.

Mr Ecclestone was quoted in the German media last month as saying the sport could do without a race in Australia, but he was much nicer during a telephone hook-up from London this week with antipodean journalists.

“We don’t want to be pushy and be in a town which doesn’t want us," he said. “It’s a good event, it’s well managed, well organised and people like to be there.

“Commercially, it’s not top of the events we have outside Europe. But we’ve been together a long time — it’s one of those long marriages — it’d be bad to get a divorce, but if the other partner wishes so, we wouldn’t start fighting."

The Weekend Financial Review took the opportunity to inquire, solicitously, how Mr Ecclestone’s personal wealth was faring, roughly speaking.

He replied, with some feeling in his voice, that he was not quite so rich as he had been since his high-profile divorce from former Croatian model Slavica. But the English media is reporting that Mr Eccleston, 80, is still worth around two billion quid, so there’s no need for food parcels.

He says he has recovered from a bad mugging in London a few months ago and is expected to attend the Melbourne race, which has renewed prominence after Middle East tensions forced the cancellation of the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix. Mr Ecclestone dropped a broad hint by saying that he had taken some Russians to last year’s race in Singapore and that they had loved it. “You get a massive worldwide audience," he said.

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But arguing that Melbourne was “just as important to us as Monaco" was perhaps stretching things a bit.

The Down Under event has been popular with the teams, but slightly less so since it was pushed back to have a twilight finish to be a better fit for international television broadcasts.

The basic problem for Melbourne is that using the Albert Park street circuit requires annual construction and removal costs of about $25 million. Last year’s four-day attendance was estimated at 305,000, up some 18,000 on 2009, but well below the peak of 401,000 way back in 1996.